Eric Sloof

The Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.

vSphere Storage is the essential component that glues the vSphere environment together. Most of the enterprise, as well as basic features, in vSphere require some sort of storage, be it local, remote, dedicated, or shared. The larger the environment, the more complex the storage design and choices. The author's approach is two-fold. He will first demystify the “black-box” called storage in the vSphere environment. He will then provide illustrated step-by-step procedures for doing common tasks that will gradually introduce more complex tasks. Based on the vSphere 5 release.

Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 5.0 by Mostafa Khalil Published Jan 10, 2012 by VMware Press. Part of the VMware Press series.

Table of Contents Part 1: Storage 1. Storage Types 2. Protocols and Standards 3. Storage Connectivity and Media 4. VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) 5. 3rd party Multipathing Plug-ins 6. Storage Virtualization Devices (SVDs) 7. LUN Sizing Design Decisions and Best Practices 8. Performance Optimization Monitoring Part 2: File Systems 9. VMFS 10. NFS 11. VisorFS Part 3: Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) 12. Concept and Architecture 13. Design Decisions for using SVAs Part 4: Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) 14. Virtual Machines and Applications Clustering 15. Metro Clusters and Stretch Clusters 16. Standby Servers (Blades) 17. Disaster Recovery Design

Deploy a Corporate Profile on Employee-owned Devices Enforce security and compliance policies. With VMware MVP, a personal profile and a corporate profile can securely and simultaneously run on the same device in isolated containers. Corporate applications and data are securely isolated from an employee’s personal profile. Ease Mobility Management Remotely provision, manage and update corporate profiles in a streamlined manner, irrespective of the mobile device. With VMware MVP, employees can connect their own mobile devices to the corporate network from a corporate profile that is provisioned and managed by the corporate IT group. IT administrator can manage mobile end-points and desktop from a single interface.
Check-out LG Android VMware Horizon Mobile hands-on for more details

The new and improved VMware vMotion in VMware vSphere 5.0 incorporates a number of enhancements that leverage the power of the solid state drive and 10 gigabit Ethernet technologies that are increasingly adopted in today's datacenters. These enhancements vastly improve both the usability and performance of vMotion. Testing in VMware performance labs shows it is easier than ever to use vMotion to manage even large virtual machines running heavy-duty, enterprise-class applications with minimal overhead. This session will describe the vMotion architecture and the new and enhanced features of vMotion in vSphere 5.0. Performance implications with data from a wide variety of tier 1 application workloads will also be discussed. We will share common pitfalls as well as best practices that enable you to get the maximum benefit from the new and improved vMotion technology.

Video - Metro vMotion in vSphere 5.0

Video - Running vMotion on multiple–network adaptors

White Paper - vMotion Architecture, Performance, and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5 

The majority of business-critical applications such as Web applications, database servers, and enterprise messaging systems have been successfully virtualized, proving the benefits of virtualization for reducing cost and streamlining IT management. However, the adoption of virtualization in the area of latency-sensitive applications has been slow partly due to unsubstantiated performance concerns. By taking VoIP service as an example, this paper demonstrates that vSphere 5 brings the same virtualization benefits to latency-sensitive applications, and vSphere 5 does this while driving good performance. In particular, vSphere 5 delivers excellent out-of-the-box performance in terms of voice quality when running VoIP service. VoIP applications are characterized by latency-sensitivity that dictates audio data be delivered at regular intervals to achieve good voice quality. Irregular delivery may lead to packet drops, severely deteriorating user experience. Therefore, timely processing and delivery of audio data is critically important to VoIP service. In the virtualized environment, however, meeting this requirement for VoIP applications is more challenging due to the additional layer of scheduling virtual machines (VMs) and processing network packets. Despite such challenges, vSphere 5 is able to achieve great performance for VoIP applications thanks to the following reasons. First, vSphere 5 facilitates the highly optimized networking stack and paravirtualized device drivers to minimize virtualization overhead, adding little variance in packet delivery1. The overhead is usually in the order of tens of microseconds that are negligible, especially to VoIP applications, where packets need to be delivered at intervals of tens of milliseconds. Second, vSphere 5 gives each VM a fair share of CPU2, ensuring the predictable processing of audio data even under high CPU contention when running multiple VMs. Finally, the Network I/O Control (NetIOC) feature allows VoIP traffic to be isolated by partitioning physical network bandwidth. This helps to achieve the intended voice quality when VoIP traffic competes for shared network resources. This paper illustrates that: • Excellent out-of-the-box VoIP performance is achieved with a large number of users served by a commercial VoIP media server hosted on vSphere 5. • vSphere 5 is able to maintain great VoIP performance when running a large number of instances of VoIP server; results showed that vSphere 5 provided good performance even when running 12 instances configured with a total of 48 vCPUs on a system with 8 cores, utilizing more than 90% of the physical CPUs. • With Network I/O Control (NetIOC), vSphere 5 is able to preserve voice quality under high contention for network resources.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/voip-perf-vsphere5.pdf

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director 1.5 helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations. vCloud Director 1.5 adds the following new features specific to accelerating application delivery in the cloud: • Fast Provisioning 
• vCloud Custom Guest Data • Expanded vCloud API and SDK • vCloud API Query Service • vCloud Messages • Cisco Nexus 1000v Integration • vSphere 5.0 Support • Microsoft SQL Server Support • Globalization • vShield Five Tuple Firewall Rules • Static Routing • IPSec Site-to-Site VPN This white paper addresses three areas regarding vCloud Director performance: • vCloud Director sizing guidelines and software requirements • Best practices in performance and tuning  • Performance characterization for key vCloud Director operations

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vcloud-director-perf.pdf

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 provides business continuity and disaster recovery protection for VMware virtual environments. Protection can range from virtual machines (VMs) residing on a single, replicated datastore to all the VMs in a datacenter and includes protection for the operating systems and applications running in the VM. The goal of this white paper is to provide you with SRM performance data and recommendations so that you can architect an efficient recovery plan that minimizes the recovery time for your environment. This white paper addresses various dimensions on which the recovery time depends: • Number of virtual machines and protection groups associated with a recovery plan • Leveraging DPM and DRS for a better recovery • Configuration of various recovery plan parameters • Priority assignment of virtual machines in the recovery plan • Improvements to the performance of recovering multiple protection groups within a single recovery plan Furthermore, VMware suggest best practices in applicable areas so that you can optimize the recovery time using SRM.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/srm5-perf.pdf

The goal of this 3 day course is to equip consulting professionals with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in designing a VMware vSphere 5 virtual infrastructure. Given an organization’s constraints and requirements, the infrastructure should be available, scalable, manageable, and secure while meeting the organization’s business objectives. The course is based on VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server 5. This course discusses the benefits and risks of available design alternatives and provides information to support making sound design decisions. This course also provides an opportunity to practice your design skills by working with peers on a design project. Objectives: • Understand and apply a framework to a design. • Design a storage solution to use vSphere in an enterprise. • Design a network to use vSphere in an enterprise. • Design compute resources for an enterprise. • Design virtual machines to run applications in a virtual infrastructure. • Design a virtual datacenter for an enterprise. • Incorporate management and monitoring features in the design. • Identify design goals, requirements, constraints, and risks. • Identify useful information for making design decisions. • Recognize and analyze best-practice recommendations. • Analyze alternative design choices. Course Datasheet

This 4 days hands-on training course builds your skills in the VMware View™ suite of products: VMware View™ Manager, View Composer, and VMware ThinApp®. This course is based on the View 5.0 and ThinApp 4.6 releases. Before attending this course, you must be able to perform the following tasks:
• Create a template in VMware vCenter Server™ and deploy a virtual machine from the template. • Modify a template customization file. • Open a virtual machine console in vCenter Server and access the guest operating system. • Configure Active Directory services.
Objectives:
• Install and configure View components. • Create and manage dedicated and floating desktop pools. • Deploy and manage linked-clone virtual desktops. • Configure and manage desktops that run in local mode. • Configure user profiles with View Persona Management. • Configure secure access to desktops through a public network. • Use ThinApp to package applications.